On a December morning in 1997, Michael Carneal, a short, awkward
freshman at Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, methodically
pulled out a gun he had wrapped in a blanket and shot four girls
huddled in a school prayer group, killing three and leaving one a
paraplegic. Four months later, 11-year-old Andrew Golden and
13-year-old Mitchell Johnson, both students at Westside Middle School
outside Jonesboro, Arkansas, planted themselves on a hillside and shot
into the playground below. The two killed four Westside girls and a
teacher.

Fourteen such school shootings, including the massacre at Columbine,
occurred in the latter half of the 1990s, causing Americans to wonder
if something had gone tragically haywire with its young people and
schools. The U.S. Department of Education, under the auspices of the
National Science Foundation, commissioned notable Harvard sociologist
Katherine Newman to investigate the two shootings mentioned above, in
particular. She, in turn, had four of her doctoral students move to
West Paducah and Jonesboro to conduct field research.

While Newman and her assistants found that all three student
shooters had serious, if not always obvious, problems—Carneal was
mentally ill, Golden a gun fanatic, and Johnson a victim of sexual
abuse—their central focus in Newman’s book, Rampage,
is not on the pathology of the shooters. Instead, they focus on how
"the organization of public schools prevents [those schools] from
recognizing and processing the information [about potentially dangerous
students] correctly."

At both Heath High and Westside Middle, there were abundant warning
signs. Carneal, for instance, had written an English essay about
torturing and killing "preps," yet his teacher did nothing. No staff
member at Westside, meanwhile, followed up after a student reported
hearing Golden talk about hurting himself and others. And the bullying
all three students had endured was ignored, even after Carneal was
labeled a "fag" in the student newspaper. The three also discussed,
sometimes in specific detail, their rampage plans with other students,
almost all of whom remained silent.

So why did no one take preventive action? Most students believed
that the threats were just talk, that the shooters "wouldn’t do
that." Beyond this, there was an implicit, schoolwide code of silence.
For the kids, the risks of being a tattletale were simply too great;
such students would be ostracized. But for teachers and administrators,
a different kind of logic came into play. They believed in a "clean
slate"—namely, that student misdeeds and shaky reputations be
erased from one year to the next in the name of a fresh start. While
Newman feels that this desire to absolve is admirable, she also
demonstrates that it can be dangerous.

In recent years, a heightened awareness of the potential for
violence has resulted in some shifts in attitude. Newman reports that a
number of planned school shootings have been averted by students (all
girls, interestingly enough) who reported threats to teachers. And most
schools now respond quickly to threats, expelling, for instance,
students caught with weapons.

Still, Newman convincingly argues that certain conditions in society
and schools continue to foster the potential for school violence. Too
many boys, for instance, succumb to a "cultural script"—evident
in movies and the like—that accepts violence as a norm. And far
too many schools tolerate bullying as something picked-upon students
simply must endure. But, in a terrifying effort to reverse their
fortunes, school shooters "often target those at the top of the social
hierarchy, the jocks and the preps," according to Newman.

This hierarchy is examined in fascinating detail by another
distinguished sociologist, the University of Virginia’s Murray
Milner, who did intensive fieldwork at the pseudonymous Woodrow Wilson
High School over a two-year period and, as part of his research,
collected essays from 300 undergraduates about their high school
experiences. Milner finds that the "cool kids" tend to be athletes and
physically attractive; the alienated "freaks" and "geeks," on the other
hand, are considered bottom of the barrel.

What’s disturbing about this pecking order is not so much its
makeup—that’s been around forever—but its
intractability. By the time students are sophomores, the order is
pretty much set. In fact, Milner likens the high school hierarchy to a
caste system, which keeps students from moving from one level to
another. Essentially this results in attempts to "move up by putting
others down,...a common phenomenon among adolescents."

While put-downs rarely lead to the kinds of tragedies Newman writes
about, they do, at the very least, cause anguish for many. Milner
proposes a number of ways to combat this status-seeking ruthlessness,
including the random assignment of students to various activities
(intramural sports teams, for example) and granting privileges based on
age, such as upperclassmen running assemblies, that cut across status
groups. Most of all, teenagers need to have relationships more often,
and that are more meaningful, with adults other than their parents,
which would "decrease the extent to which their lives are centered on
the opinions of peers."

Many adults remember the teen years as the most difficult time of
their lives. Perhaps this is inevitable, given the enormous physical,
intellectual, and emotional changes teenagers must endure. But
adolescence doesn’t have to be, as the authors of these important
works tell us, as cruel and dangerous as it too often is.

WHAT THE BEST COLLEGE TEACHERS DOby Ken Bain
(Harvard, 224 pages, $21.95)

Bain, a historian and director of New York University’s Center
for Teaching Excellence, studied 63 outstanding college teachers (as
deemed by students and colleagues as well as by an examination of their
students’ work) from diverse institutions in an attempt to
identify their common traits. What he discovered is pertinent to all
teachers, including those at the K-12 level.

Interestingly enough, Bain could not determine a particular profile
for great teachers—some were charismatic extroverts, others
brooding introverts. Nevertheless, they all took a similar approach to
the craft of teaching. For one thing, they worked "backward," first
thinking of the content and intellectual skills they wanted students to
finish with and only then considering week-to-week stepping stones. And
rather than "stuff" students with facts and procedures, the teachers
inspired their charges to examine their own conceptions and
misconceptions about subject matter— to "think about their
thinking."

Bain’s research also offers some very practical suggestions.
His outstanding teachers, for instance, tended to avoid talking about
course requirements the first day of class; instead, they usually spoke
of "the promises of the course, about the kinds of questions the
discipline will help students answer." They also tended to begin
discussions by posing a question and then giving students a few minutes
to ponder it. Here again, the goal was to inspire deep thinking in lieu
of "canned" responses—in short, to develop curious students who
will come to take responsibility for their own learning.

—David Ruenzel

Vol. 15, Issue 6, Page 55

Published in Print: May 1, 2004, as Reviews

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